My childhood experience of circuses was a modern one.  When the circus rolled in to town, it was a massive stadium event; we bought our snacks and crammed into our seats to peer at the antics on a stage far below. The show was entertaining, but smoothly corporate.  I mostly remember feeling bad for the animals, and kind of turned off by the cheesy fanfare and glitz of it all.  There was a sense that we were seeing a big-business version of something that had once been exciting.  It was a glossy, nostalgic riff on early 20th-century Americana.

I guess I'm susceptible to that nostalgia, because I am fascinated by the circuses of yore, in all their crazy, queer, dangerous, broken flamboyance. A couple months ago I went to a reading by Janet M. Davis, who edited and annotated a book called Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Memoir of Tiny Kline. Tiny Kline, born in 1891, immigrated to America and lived her whole life on the theatrical fringe as a vaudeville dancer, circus acrobat, daredevil. Here's a quick clip of her in 1932 (for context, the same year the movie Freaks came out), crossing Times Square on a wire, dangling by her teeth.

I asked Janet Davis about the policemen at the end of that clip; were they just part of a setup for more publicity?  With a crowd of thousands gathered below, surely they would have had time to stop Ms. Kline while she was setting up the act, instead of showing up afterward... and yet she does look genuinely upset by them.  Davis didn't know, but agreed it's hard to take them seriously because they sound just like movie cops from, say, 1932.  Did people ever really talk that way?  I like to think Tiny set it up; I like to think people would not respond to such a glorious feat of derring-do by promptly hassling her about rules.  But who knows.  She had transgressed, and she was not a "respectable" woman.

There's a nice overview of the book here if you want to get an idea of what it's about, and I agree that "Kline's book is not only a personal memoir but a vibrant portrait, almost a history, of American circus life" in its heyday.  It's a rare angle from which to view the early 20th century, and Davis does a great job of framing the narrative within questions of class, race, gender, and American identity.  Get your freak on and enjoy.